When you talk about cloned devices, most people would think of the usual fake iPhones and fake Nokia phones from China, but could you ever imagine Apple’s iPad being sued for being a clone? The Shenzhen Great Long Brother Industrial Co. has already applied for a patent of its P88 tablet back last May, entering a process that could take up to a year in China.
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What’s the most important news story in the world today? The Haiti earthquake, the possibility of peace talks with the Taliban or Tony Blair facing questioning in the inquiry into the invasion of Iraq? Don’t be silly. It’s a new consumer gadget from Apple.

A quick glance at Google News US shows 1,118 stories covering the Haiti quake - fewer than the number of people confirmed dead - 3,151 on the Taliban peace talks and 1,962 on ex-British PM Tony Blair appearing at the Iraq inquiry. The Apple iPad appears to need 8,667 almost identical stories telling us how wonderful it is.

Am I the only person who finds this obscene?

By what right does the religious cult of Apple - and be assured that’s exactly what it is - dominate the news completely?

This Wednesday, it seemed that the world stood still. Nothing was happening anywhere in the world that came close to the importance of the launch of a big iPhone that you can’t even buy yet.

Now, I realize a lot of people love everything Apple does, but surely even they would agree that 200,000 people dying in an earthquake should possibly take precedence over a bloody computer.
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Users of Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone may now be able to save money by making Internet-based phone calls over AT&T Inc.’s cellular network.

Apple this week allowed new versions of several Voice over Internet Protocol services to begin working on the iPhone, according to those services. Previously, iPhone users needed a wireless Internet connection to make such calls, but the change will allow calls from anywhere that receives a strong enough 3G cellular signal.
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Immediately following Apple’s iPad reveal event, the Mac maker offered us an opportunity to go hands-on with the touchscreen-controlled tablet. The demo unit came loaded with apps, including about a dozen games. We took (most of) them for a spin.

The games on hand, titles like Gameloft’s N.O.V.A., Electronic Arts’ Need For Speed: Shift and Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, were simply the versions designed with the iPhone and iPod Touch in mind. They were the iPhone apps you can purchase and play right now, upscaled to fit the iPad’s screen. iPad-specific games are expected to ship on or around the device’s official launch this spring.
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Days after announcing he’d managed to hack Sony’s PlayStation 3 console to run his own software George Hotz has released the exploit online.

Hotz, who is best known for cracking Apple’s iPhone, said in a blog posting that he had decided to release the exploit to see what others could do with it and because he wanted to move on to other work.

“Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,” he wrote. “I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night.”
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Apple is widely expected to launch a tablet style computing device Wednesday with an eye to grabbing first mover’s advantage in what’s expected to be the PC industry’s hot new category for 2010. But Apple may not have the field to itself for long, as rival Microsoft is planning to get in on the tablet action.

The difference is that Redmond will likely attack the market through hardware partners like Hewlett-Packard and Acer, rather than introduce a Microsoft-branded device. Indeed, CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated a prototype HP tablet powered by Windows 7 earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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Nokia’s N900 is certainly a cool phone, but the Maemo 5 OS that it runs may not be for everybody. Considering that Google’s Android OS is one of the more popular operating systems out there at the moment, it’s really cool to find out that a person called Brandon Roberts has managed to get Nokia’s N900 to dual-boot Maemo and Android. It’s currently still a proof-of-concept, but it seems pretty usable from the video that was posted.
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